Laws of Nature and their Supporting Casts

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8399355
AutoresTravis Mckenna (North Carolina State University, autor correspondente)
Ano2023
Volume77
Fascículo2
Páginas000-000
Data de publicação2023-05-12
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoThe British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0007-0882 • E-ISSN: 1464-3537
EditoraUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/725906
OpenAlexW4376223494
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas35

What role do laws of nature play in the process of scientific inquiry? In answering this question, philosophers have tended to focus on a handful of predictive and explanatory roles with which laws have been traditionally associated. I argue that this traditional focus overlooks an important fact about scientific practice: before they can be of any predictive or explanatory use, laws must often be supplemented by a wide variety of modelling ingredients, such as material parameters, boundary conditions, auxiliary models, and so on – what I call their supporting casts. As a result, many accounts of laws have trouble conferring lawhood on the kinds of generalisations and principles worth calling laws without also conferring it on those features that play a merely supporting role. I argue that the key to avoiding this problem lies in recognising the important role that laws play in helping us to coordinate the various different kinds of information we must make use of in our attempts to model some system and thus explain or predict its behaviour. In addition to contributing to a more complete philosophical picture of scientific methodology surrounding laws, my account of this coordinating role also helps us to identify several distinct explanatory and predictive roles that laws play in scientific practice

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